Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate profile: James Coyne King

Editor’s note: This is the first in The Republican’s series of profiles of Massachusetts candidates for U.S. Senate. The upcoming schedule: Marisa DeFranco, Feb. 12; Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren, Feb. 19.

BOSTON – The view of Boston from James Coyne King’s meeting room on the 21st floor of One Beacon St. is panoramic and spectacular, befitting the success of his law firm, Murphy & King. If he beats the odds and is elected U.S. senator from Massachusetts next year, King acknowledges he would take a hefty pay cut. That wouldn’t bother him at all.

“There’s a public service aspect that’s just part of me,” he said.

As a longtime corporate lawyer and former prosecutor in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Justice Department, King, 63, has the credentials to tackle the complicated economic issues that face a senator. Combine that with a liberal deference to individual rights and a readiness to do battle in the political arena, and King just might embody the qualities he envisions in a senator from Massachusetts.

A native of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., King made his way to Boston through a circuitous route that had its first stop in Washington, D.C., where he earned a master’s degree in tax law at Georgetown University as well as his law degree. From there, he dove into the fray, starting as an attorney at the Internal Revenue Service before moving on to the Justice Department. As a federal prosecutor, King dealt in issues such as price fixing and bid rigging, visiting 40 states in the process and running grand juries. In the late 1970s, he worked on President Jimmy Carter’s Antitrust Commission.

King also served as a special assistant to U.S attorneys in Colorado and Boston, forming bonds that ultimately led him to start his own law firm in 1980. Three decades later, Murphy & King has 40 lawyers and offices in Boston, New York and Washington.

Politics was part of the family fabric when King was growing up in New York. At the dinner table, King and his parents and brothers were apt to dissect a speech by President John F. Kennedy or discuss the implications of Nikita Kruschev banging his shoe at the United Nations. His years in Washington only honed his appetite.

“You can’t be in Washington, D.C., without getting into politics,” King said.

King gravitated naturally toward the Democratic side of the fence. He counted the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, whose former seat he is seeking, among his friends. He is sympathetic to many of the ideas behind Occupy Wall Street, in part because he prosecuted some of the perceived excesses the movement is protesting.

“History shows that when you have extremes, the center can’t hold,” he said. “The Republican ideas won’t work. I don’t think they’re being intellectually honest. We can’t operate our country with tax rates at the level they’re at now.”

– James Coyne King

“Changes need to be made in our securities laws so that banks are required to be banks and not gamblers with taxpayers’ money,” he said. “The Justice Department should take a close look at criminal conduct involving the banks that took big losses. It’s fraud, really.”

Like many other Democrats, King sees the Republicans in Congress as obstructionists who could never run a country based on their no-new-taxes ideology. “History shows that when you have extremes, the center can’t hold,” he said. “The Republican ideas won’t work. I don’t think they’re being intellectually honest. We can’t operate our country with tax rates at the level they’re at now.”

Nor does King buy into the trendy position that government is the enemy.

“I’m not going to stand by and see young children without enough to eat,” he said. “We have programs to deal with that.”

Education is a big piece of King’s platform. He’s a proponent of state and community colleges and advocates more federal grants to help students pay for college. As a self-described pragmatist, he would like to see colleges focus more on training students for local jobs, so they can actually make the products they learn about.

King also proposes offering businesses tax incentives drawn from unemployment benefits to hire people who are out of work.

“It’s like a no-brainer,” he said. “The government saves half the money it pays for benefits, and people are employed and paying taxes.”

Although he does not profess to understand all the details of the national health-care bill, King is a believer in government-supported health care. He also believes matters such as same-sex marriage, abortion and gun control are better left to the individuals involved than to the government, even when the outcome conflicts with his Catholic faith.

King, who has a number of clients in Western Massachusetts, claims to understand the area better than any of his opponents. He believes wind power has a future along the Metacomet Range and that the area can benefit more from its historical and artistic wealth as well as tourist attractions such as the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield. He also promised to show his face in the area if elected.

“Where I grew up, we were slighted by New York City in the same way,” he said. “A senator needs to be visible in all parts of the state.”

King understands that he’s facing an uphill battle against Elizabeth Warren in the primary and incumbent Republican Scott Brown in the general election, but he is undaunted. In fact, he said Brown’s election two years ago prompted him to run.

“I said I might have to run here because he’s not an appropriate senator for Massachusetts,” he said. “We have a legacy of leadership and duty to deal with the different issues of the day, and he’s not the one.”

While money pours in from out of state for Brown and Warren, King is running a relatively low-key operation that includes his son Christopher, also a lawyer. In addition to Christopher, King has two stepchildren through his marriage to his second wife, Peggy King. His first wife is deceased.

“I’ve seen how much Brown and Warren have raised, but at the end of the day, it’s not about money but who the voters select,” he said. “I don’t shy away from a fight. It makes the mountain higher, but we’ve gone up mountains before.”